I’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from the wonderful workshop we had last week at the DGfS conference about modal flavours. The idea for this workshop had formed last year during the SIAS summer institute on the investigation of linguistic meaning, together with Ryan Bochnak and Anne Mucha. We were very happy to win Aynat Rubinstein as our invited speaker and get some excellent submissions from various subfields of linguistics. We gave an overview of background motivations and common themes of the talks in our introduction.
News
Out now: Indefinites in Daakaka (Vanuatu)
There are two indefinite articles in the Oceanic language Daakaka, TUSWA and SWA. Like weak NPIs or unspecific indefinites in many other languages, TUSWA is excluded from positive assertions about the episodic past or present. In this paper, I try to locate them within the cross-linguistic space of indefinites and NPIs and sketch out an approach to account for their differences.
Read the full paper here.
Upcoming talk at Cologne
I’m excited to visit Cologne again, this time for a talk on an Oceanic perspective on tense and modality. If you’re in the area, you’ll find the details here.
Alienability as control — now out in print
I was fortunate to be invited as a contributor to a special edition of Lingua (in pre-Glossa times) on possession. My article on “Alienability as control” is now out in print at long last and, alas, behind a paywall. You can contact me to get the manuscript.
Towards an ontology of modal flavors
I’m very excited about our upcoming workshop at the DGfS 2017 titled “Towards an ontology of modal flavors”. Watch this link for a description and updates on the schedule:
Franz Boas Award
Congratulations go to my esteemed colleague Sonja Riesberg who received the first Franz Boas Award for her work in the collection and archiving of data for the CELD corpus! The award is meant to promote collections of archived materials as academic publications and generate awareness and recognition for this type of scholarly output.
Poster for Sinn und Bedeutung 2016
I’m excited about the upcoming Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Edinburgh. The program looks very promising and I’ll have an opportunity to discuss some of my latest thoughts on the Daakaka distal and modal semantics more generally. If you can’t come but would like to see my poster, here it is.
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